FAQs

Q) We are about to start a new project. Which is the best language to use C# or VB.Net?

A) In the past it was important to evaluate a programming language on their performance with respect to compilation and execution efficiency or the debugging tools available. However this is irrelevant when comparing .Net languages as the all access the same classes and compile into the same Common Intermediate Language (CIL). With Visual Studio they also share the same development environment. So what is important when deciding which language to choose? The most important questions to ask is when making this decision are:

• Do you have any existing code that could be used in the new project?
• Do you have any developers that can code in these languages and if so what is the standard of these
  developers?

If you already have a significant amount of code in either language it is probably best to stay with it. Mixing software languages is a bit like mixing human languages. Even if you had bilingual writers it would not make sense to maintain documents in French and English. Maintenance is one of the most important considerations and keeping the code in the same language is a good idea.

 

If you are planing a green field project and have no existing code then consider the available development resources and go for the language used by your best developers. The quality of the software will be influenced far more by the ability of the developers than the language used. Bad code is bad code no matter what the language
used to write it.

After these considerations it doesn't make too much difference and we would probably go with C# just because it
is a bit newer than VB.Net.

 

Q) How much time should be allocated for software testing?

A) The short answer is how much testing do you want to do? The more testing completed before release the less chance of delivering a product with defects but this should be weight up against the cost of testing resources and getting the product to the market quickly. It also depends on the type of application. You would hope that those
who develop software applications to launch nuclear missiles would test it more comprehensively than those who produce a kid's game. As a rough guide for most business applications we recommend that you allow 25% of the development time for testing and then add more if the consequences of failure are high.